What is the differences between utilitarian and hedonic services?? According to the article, 'hedonic services tend to involeve physical acts to customers' bodies, which are largely inseparable in nature.' Is there any examples that hedonic services can be separated??

and I think it depends on how we define "hedonic services". When I first see this two words, I think of sports or spa which have direct contact to our bodies. But after reading professor Huang's reply, I think of another example : compare going to a sports game and simply watch the game on TV, one is unseparable and the other is separable.

YOUNGJIN_KIM wrote:What is the differences between utilitarian and hedonic services?? According to the article, 'hedonic services tend to involeve physical acts to customers' bodies, which are largely inseparable in nature.' Is there any examples that hedonic services can be separated??

Based on my understanding, utilitarian services is the service to help us get things done, things that we don't feel enjoyable and we would hope to spend the least time and effort on them. Hedonic services, on the contrary are things we enjoy doing, so we would like to indulge ourselves in them.

Hedonic services, such as entertainment, are not necessarily inseparable. For example, computer games seems to be a separable hedonic service.

I think hedonic services in Japan tend to be more inseparable than similar services in other countries. They believe that the production and consumption of the services should be performed simultaneous because they think it can gain more customers' trust...

But the situation has been changed these days. Due to blooming technology, more and more services provided separable which used to be inseparable. Take Live concert for example, you can watch it with High Definition TV signal and the quality is as good as you directly go there.

Utilitarian is related to something usefull, we need it. Otherwise, hedonic needs is related to pleasure, something that make you happy. It 's more subjectif that utilitarian because it depends on people.